Horizon Strikes Again

Those comments
Those comments


Those comments

Thats what they all say. But what I don't get is why don't the people who run the servers just sell gil themselves? Maybe they are IDK.

oen day we will have a official 75 era Server and we can complete with gill buyers there no worries guys, only 400 people will play because they don't want to pay for the game trust me but they can buy amounts of gill for 700 dollars

There are respected and skilled people who care about this game and would setup an amazing private server if the time came it was actually needed (and funding would be accepted to run it under those circumstances), anyone that would do it when it obviously hurts retail does not care about the game and just wants to either make money above and beyond running costs or fluff their own ego.

I play on and support private servers for games that have closed and run by people who obviously love them, not grifters damaging the live servers that the company is still running though. That's outrageous behavior, I don't care how you want to justify it.

I think part of the reason H has so much drama is the guy running it tries to take credit for everyone else's work and has turned this major project hundreds of other people created into his own personal thing now (and doesn't even give back into the project he pulled from, cause he is afraid they might steal "his" thunder), when he has very little to bring to the table himself and didn't create most of what is there either.

Also because it's all very shady in general, with dark money floating around.

Look, I'll be the first to say I'm not a fan of PS and they harm retail, but this paints with a rather broad brush...There could be people who just want to play "era" ffxi, or want to *** around with their own custom settings on "era" without any ill intents re: money or ego. It's entirely possible that someone could want to play FFXI in their nostalgic timeframe and they need players to play with, so they hype it up, advertise, etc. to get the necessary playerbase so they can find a level 38 RDM when they want to exp.

I'm also not saying that's what's happening here, just saying that nefarious intentions are not a requirement to run a private server, or to make efforts to popularize it.

The thing that has given me an overall negative opinion was the mass and blatant advertising and that crossed the line hard, they even did it for months on reddit.

I honestly never minded them so much before that.

I'm genuinely curious, but what would you say that you think this looks like? I know you disclaimed your statement by saying that people will complain anyway, and you're right about that part too. I've just never had anyone willing to engage in good faith as to how a server can financially sustain itself in a way that is above board. I want to say that optional donations is the best way, and that's what we did, (and people complained) but I would love to hear alternate ideas as well.

Sell gil to your players. Seems obvious, like someone said i doubt people would pay a subscription, but would happily pay for gil. Would also give them incentive to keep playing there because they would be invested. Not that I agree with paying for gil or playing on a private server, but I know how people are, which is why i think sponsoring a server by selling gil might work.

I think this would be unpopular with a vocal minorrity, but honestly its how other games' private server projects make money and sustain themselves. Project Ascension is always the one I point to as a success of riches - they sell in-game boosts and stuff that can be sold on the auction house, which is effectively the same as selling gold - and they make the sort of money that allows them to actually have paid staff and developers which in turn results in a better product.

That being said, I highly doubt you could do something like that with this community. WoW private servers are accustomed to forking over their credit card for stuff like that because the retail version of the game has softened them up to the idea.

don't give them ideas

If PS are so popular and the people aren't playing them because they're free, shouldn't it be absurdly easy to make them solvent or profitable?

If you accept voluntary donations and everyone pays $10/month (less than retail) then you'd have way more money than you could ever possibly need to maintain the servers, and could even look into paying devs/support staff.

If people aren't willing to pay $10/month then...what's that say about your community? I'm not going to say they're poors, I'll wait for Nynja to come post that like every other time, but I'd personally say that a large portion of the users are there because it's free. That's not to say that PS aren't worth money, I think it's more because of the fact that a $0 barrier to entry and $0 monthly commitment makes it much easier to convince yourself or your friends to play.

Here come the PS stans to say they'd gladly pay $25/month for the privilege of playing on a PS and all their PS friends say the same thing. Seems like your funding problem is solved then!

I have a problem with the idea of server owners selling gil, not from a moral standpoint, but from the standpoint of gameplay and economic balance. If you can just buy 100m gil at the drop of a hat, it will change the way people play. You'll have people farming fewer materials, prices for valuable stuff will skyrocket, and it will really mess with the gameplay experience. For working professionals, it's also incredibly tempting to pay an hour or two's salary to save yourself hundreds of hours of "the boring stuff", but I think this cheapens the experience and runs counter to the narrative people tell themselves about how they "love the grindiness of FFXI" and how it's an old school, hardcore, no nonsense game.

If they openly took profit, they'd be taken down.

A sub or anything resembling fees would be a bad idea. Square would be forced to enforce their (IP/TM whichever it is) or lose it.

yeah donations would definitely get them taken down if they profited. i don't think most of you understand how some of that works.

furthermore, the explanation that people playing retail are rich and private server players are poors has always been something that's lost on me.

the methodology behind donations being as good as a subscription is moronic, people generally just aren't going to donate if its optional. i'm guessing none of you donate to literally anything in your every day lives. looking at an example on retail ffxi, close to 0 people donated to 3rd party bot makers until recently when they were basically forced t

FFXI died January 22, 2009, when SE banned all the best players of FFXI and "the game wont last without us".

Its not dead yet.

I don't have an answer, but the current model obviously doesn't work. The only people (yourself included) who put considerable work into any private server do it for their ego, to wield power over others, or to make money. The last is the least harmful to the server experience, as it doesn't degrade gameplay or appearance of propriety. Obviously this doesn't include methods like the current thread where the money is made in a way that directly alters server balance(spawning economy-influencing things to sell).

Unfortunately, any open way of collecting money for the server is going to get attacked by the butthurt brigade(every other private server and retail stans like Draylo and Radial) for making money off of SE's IP. The end result is likely that the funding platform kicks you off, or you get an actual C&D from SE. Doesn't matter if it's donations, a sub fee, or a cash shop (though a cash shop with cosmetics is likely somewhat viable if people truly enjoy the server, they'll see it as a way to support as much as a purchase). The tools do exist now to actually create new items and models without immense effort.

For a server to be able to get away with creating a sustainable model, they need to do the work to make sure they are truly and completely legal and likely set up their own payment processing as well. I don't know whether it'd be profitable or not, and I imagine that's why nobody has tried doing it that way. But, the current method of 'find enough free labor' has shown a half dozen times now that it just results in corrupt staff and stagnant progress every single time.

I took the following quote to mean we were talking about an environment post-retail, where the only option are private servers. I'm not suggesting that they start charging sub fees right now.



Yeah, again, my point. Loads of people on PS claim they'd absolutely pay real, US dollars, to play on PS, but I am extremely skeptical of this claim because there are ways of donating and yet I don't see people sending them $15/month every month. If there was a required subscription fee, a large portion of the playerbase would stop playing, either immediately or after a little bit. Their growth would stop because new players would be turned off by the sub fee that currently doesn't exist.

This is why people call PS players poors, because they claim to be willing to pay for something, but realistically in practical terms, if there was a fee they wouldn't play. Again, I don't think this is because of the economic status of the players and I think "they're poors" is a meme, but there's undoubtedly a difference in monetary commitment between retail and PS players.

To defend myself a little bit, I did it because I had an interest in game design and no outlet for it. It wasn't really about ego as much as it was a want to make cool things, which is a big part of the reason why it may have looked like ego. (I didn't care if people played on Wings, I just wanted to make a cool thing I thought was good.) I've since moved on to actual game design thanks to my time working on XI private servers. It was a gateway to learn programming and has both helped me find a new career path and a new passion, and our indie studio will be releasing our first game in November. :)

I went with Patreon and people seemed alright with that for the most part. People started getting upset when I randomly decided to shoot out a cosmetic for people who were Patrons, which in any other ecosystem is a perfectly normal and expected thing to do. It was just a gesture of thanks on my part, it wasn't some ill-intended means to leverage more money, but that's just how this community is like you said.

I still stand by the idea that this is the morally superior way to do it if its going to be done. While your assertion that money is the most pure motivator is definitely correct, I just can't see a world where the people in this community ever let it fly. They'd sooner keep getting screwed by Horizon than support a server that actually wanted to put real money and development hours into LandSandBoat. Zach is a talented guy but there's only so much he can be expected to do for free. If someone could pay him to work on the project though, that might be a different story.

I don't care if people make money off SE IP, SE can kiss my ***. I care if someone is doing something that hurts the game I'm playing, and potentially bring its closure sooner than would of normally been the case.

Especially since what they offer is a scuffed Mickey Mouse version of the game that I would not touch with a barge pole, but it's still free and if you advertise it enough it can have an impact.

This stuff ain't complicated, people like game + they act in a way that potentially hurts the game you like = fk them.

Nobody cared about Wings, cause for all his faults Gwei didn't try to damage retail by advertising it in retail hangouts, intentionally trying to damage retail for personal gain.




If you make money and have people working for free what do you think will happen? They are gonna do exactly what they did and hose you, if you make money you have to split it with the people and not allow them to think you are scamming them. People will work for free all day and night if its' a passion thing, but if they get a whiff of you making money (as Horizon very clearly is) they are gonna feel stupid and get real angry about it and will have every right to be.

It's really simple, people don't like being taken advantage of.

Dammit, the plan was to subtlety convert this to a discussion on grammar. Lord knows that needs more attention around here than Horizon does.

people on private servers can't be simultaneously too poor to play retail and retail is also losing players to private servers.

do you all understand that these two things cannot coexist?

the great minds of ffxiah need to come together and figure out this dilemma

I didn't make money. The Patreon just dumped into a Paypal account that paid for the hosting cost of the server so that it could continue to run without my continued financial support. Running my server actually cost me several thousands of dollars because I bankrolled the first year and some change, as well as thousands of hours of work.


It's cause Wings wasn't for people who were interested in retail, it was for people interested in playing the game as it was during Wings of the Goddess. The argument that private servers are "pulling people away from retail" is silly because the people who play private servers and the people who play retail just aren't interested in the same stuff. I'm one of the few people who is interested in both, but that's not the majority of people.

It doesn't matter if you did or not, if you're pulling money in then you're putting yourself in a situation where the people under you have to trust you. They obviously did not cause they all turned on you.

Also who cares if you lost money? You chose to do it lol it was supposedly your passion or hobby just as any other hobby costs money to partake in. You didn't start the server as an act of kindness to others, you wanted the prestige, ego luff or whatever. You got what you wanted out of your money, and if not you're not very smart.

You can't double standard it, if your time and money are so important than why should others give their time and expertise to you for free.

I love when people try and poorly iterate things I already said back to me as if they had an original thought.


Trust had nothing to do with it, we parted ways because I was burned out and they felt like I unfairly left them to run things in my stead while I took a few week's break. Or because they had ulterior motives in the case of Aerec. He played the rest of them like a fiddle to get them to do what he was always going to do anyway, which is start Horizon. (Which was named Lilisette at the time.)

I didn't start the server at all. It was supposed to be three of us running it together. The problem was when our original hosting platform (which was very inexpensive) could not handle us being constantly DDOS'd after our launch, we were forced to use a much more expensive host that could. I stepped up and footed the bill because we already had a few hundred players relying on us at that point.

Between this and the fact that the other two people I started it with were extremely unreliable people, I was forced into a position where I had to rely on others more heavily because at the time I had very little programming knowledge. I was supposed to be the lead GM, not the jack of all trades owner. Everything else I had to learn on the fly, so I was definitely not perfect.

I get a lot of flak for things that were the result of that environment. I actually was just trying to hold things together as a kindness to others. Unlike the other two who started things with me, I felt an obligation to try and respect the players' commitment to playing there, so I did my best to try and keep it going even though I was in over my head. Most people wouldn't do that.

I mean, aside from the fact that people can be lured away from retail before even attempting it because of brigading of PS comments on YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, and all other social media...I never said that 100% of PS players wouldn't pay. Try reading this again.


Even if a large portion of the playerbase wouldn't pay for Horizon, that doesn't mean the server's existence cannot have an impact on the retail player base, see? Because it's not 100%. If 5% of the players on Horizon would be playing retail if Horizon didn't exist, then it has had an impact on the retail player base and at the same time, the vast majority of those players wouldn't pay. See how words work?

I don't see how any pserver can be truly and completely legal if the only functional client is SE's.

LSB is legal to download and run, that's not in question. Operating a public service that only works with SE's proprietary client is much less so. Kind of like how it's perfectly legal to download Kali linux and pen-test your own network, but it's a felony to do it to your neighbors.

The client is free. You can just go on their website and download it without an account. Editing the client is where the hot water begins.

Question- if the mods in a private server were selling gil to their clients, wouldn't they be profiting off the work of SE's coders, writers, composers, and branding?

If there is an opt in with PR topics, why can't we have one for private server threads?